No more talking about how in the future digital transformation will do this and that. Digital transformation has already happened – a long time ago. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, many large companies still did not have basic digital structures, such as a WhatsApp for customer service. Today, using the cell phone for research and purchases is something the customer doesn’t even think about not using. It’s natural. We are in the post-digital world, where digital experience is universal; Brazil, for example, has one of the most challenging competitive scenarios in the whole world in terms of the number of digital pure players fiercely competing for consumers’ attention and budget.
The big problem, however, is that many companies still treat digital and physical as separate entities, while for the customer, everything is part of the same experience. The true digital transformation, therefore, lies in knowing how to use the best that digital already offers for a more empowered customer and ahead of their own companies. It’s a race for organizations to use digital tools that make them more agile, pragmatic, and capable of offering a customer journey that truly improves their life. Global competition and the always imminent disruption by startups reinforce this urgency.
Customer experience as the only genuine competitive differentiator
In a market where technology is easily replicable and cloneable, a company’s real lasting competitive differentiator lies not only in its products or technologies. The only lasting competitive differentiator is the relationship with the customer.
Great theorists of the academy, like Kotler, argue that the long-term success of any company depends on having a truly customer-centered experience. Personalization and, more recently, hyper-personalization driven by converging technologies, are crucial to meeting the specific needs of each customer at their specific moment during the relationship journey with the company. The challenge is that many companies still fail to even minimally know their customers, offering inconsistent experiences across different channels.
For a company to be genuinely customer-centered, it is essential to have a team of employees engaged with the brand’s purpose and aligned with the customer. This is only possible with a very strong organizational culture. A company’s culture is like a family, where common values, greater purpose, and strategic alignment make all the difference. In the case of the company, this adds value to the service for the customer and creates a culture that shines through to the consumer. Building all this is the greatest challenge for experienced leaders, as it takes a long time and is based on intangible and attitudinal assets, in most cases.
In this context, leadership plays a fundamental role, not only in what it verbalizes, but in its behavior, posture, and how it relates. In a world where hard skills are increasingly delegated to machines and AIs, soft skills become preferable and essential for leaders and their followers.
The essential role of Big Data and artificial intelligence
Another point of attention is the importance of data in a fiercely competitive environment. Customers are already aware that their data holds value and is used to generate advertising and offers for themselves. The expectation is for companies to use this information to generate value in return, providing better and more relevant solutions.
This is where Big Data plays an essential role. It allows data from various sources to be thrown into a centralized intelligence framework, where algorithms work to find increasingly better solutions. The well-known and always relevant example of Netflix illustrates this: the platform uses artificial intelligence to compare descriptions of movies and series that the user watches, programming their screen to offer choices more aligned with their interests.
Despite the potential, many companies, including large companies leading in their fields, still do not know how to effectively use Big Data. Among the challenges, data veracity is the biggest. In a scenario of deepfakes and big fakes, the quality and authenticity of sources are critical to avoid erroneous conclusions.
Also, Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially generative AI, is developing alarmingly fast, becoming indispensable for businesses. AI acts as a support for human intelligence, delegating complex tasks to algorithms. However, generative AI, popularized by tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, presents the (decreasing) risk of “hallucinations”, meaning the generation of non-real information. It is undoubtedly a significant danger that requires a keen critical sense from the user to discern the truth. In a complex world desperate for seemingly definite answers, this is a very real risk to cognition for consumers and companies.
The Next Frontiers of Digital Transformation
· Quantum Computing: Exponentially accelerates the power of artificial intelligence, promising a “new world” and more power for big tech companies than for governments themselves.
· AI Robotics: Robots with applied and functional artificial intelligence, including generative intelligence and access to our data, can assist in household tasks and other functions. Although they offer hyper-personalization and do not “get sick”, they present significant risks related to cybersecurity.
· Cybersecurity: A growing challenge and one of the planet’s largest businesses (digital crime is the third largest business on the planet, according to Palantir and Palo Alto executives), driven by the increase in attacks and frauds. Quantum computing will further amplify this challenge as it can break current passwords and cryptographic keys.
· Delegation of decisions to AI: A growing trend of delegating decisions to artificial intelligence, as seen in self-driving cars or robotic surgeries, with the expectation that machine error will be less than human.
· AI Avatars: The vision of assistants like Iron Man’s Jarvis is a standard trend, with smartphones and other devices acting as extensions of memory and cognitive capacity.
· Return of the Metaverse: Although it was an experience considered ‘too early’ in its first boom, the evolution of hardware and the familiarity of new generations with virtual environments may bring the Metaverse back as a common space for more immersive and natural interactions.
The human at the center of technology
Given all these changes and expectations, leadership is no longer about control, but about purpose. The world will become increasingly automated, with autonomous agents driven by artificial intelligence expected to dominate the scene in the next five years, but the real differentiator will continue to be human. Therefore, reading works like “Man’s Search for Meaning,” by Viktor Frankl, is essential for those who lead in high-pressure and complex contexts. Frankl’s experience in Auschwitz shows us that, even in the most extreme situations, it is possible to find meaning, and it is this sense of purpose that guides difficult decisions.
When I look at my journey as a leader, I recognize that my biggest mistake was, for a long time, trying to shape others to work in my way. I learned — often with difficulty — that the role of a leader is not to centralize, but to empower. The leader who makes a difference is the one who brings out the best in each person around them, allowing diverse talents to come together to create something greater than any individual effort. It is this type of leadership that I want to see flourish: open, generous, and deeply human.
Digital transformation is no longer a distant promise — it is among us. But no technology, no matter how advanced, can replace the need for genuine relationships and clear purpose. Data is essential. Strong culture, indispensable. But it is at the intersection between artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence that things really happen productively and truly enhance the customer experience in all its totality.
